transcendentalism - book - 1981 - Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-1850

Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-1850
Anne C. Rose
Yale University Press
1981
269 pages


A good day to you.  I purchased Transcendentalism as a Social Movement from Seekers Books in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood.


There are scores of books about the American Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.  The Transcendentalists were a group of poets and thinkers that orbited around Ralph Waldo Emmerson, the essayist son of a Unitarian minister who combined socialist political ideals with pantheistic spirituality.  The Transcendentalists included Margaret Fuller, a proto-feminist journalist, and Henry David Thoreau, one of the best known American philosophers whose book Walden, the author’s edited journal about the experience of living simply and close to nature, is still cited by all varieties of social drop-outs (it’s mentioned as a favorite book of one of Jennifer Toth’s Mole People, for example) while his essay Civil Disobedience continues to be quoted by political dissidents on all points of the left-right spectrum.  Most of the existing books on the Transcendentalists approach the movement as a literary or philosophical school.  In Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, historian Anne C. Rose takes the much less common approach to the group as a social movement that was intent on developing new ways of living.


Anne C. Rose is currently a distinguished professor at Penn State University (America’s #1 party school according to a 2009 episode of This American Life).  She is a historian of American culture who works in Penn State’s Department of History and Religious studies, and although she has a long and varied publishing record, most of her research has focused on the history of psychiatry or on American religious practice.  Transcendentalism as a Social Movement was Rose’s first book, and according to her preface, it began as her doctoral dissertation.  Rose thus focuses on Transcendentalism as a spiritual and socialist movement in the American context, emerging from a milieu of progressive churches and religious communities operating in and nearby to Boston Massachusetts, during the early-to-mid 19th century.


Rose’s book begins with a discussion of these churches, and in particular the emergence of Unitarianism in Boston during the late 18th century.  Unitarianism is a belief system that became popular in Boston during the early 19th century that considers God to be a single entity, thereby denying the divinity of Jesus.  Christ is an exemplar of moral behavior but is not a divine authority, and individuals may exercise their free will, ideally in emulation of Christ’s model.  Unitarianism also resists the idea that any church may claim authority over interpreting the Bible.  Rose discusses in depth the fluctuations in popularity of the Unitarian Churches in Boston that provided citizens with a greater spiritual freedom than the Protestant churches that dominated the region.


Rose discusses Unitarianism as a means of introducing the cultural climate that Transcendentalism developed in.  While Unitarianism never claimed a majority of worshippers, its popularity did give rise to a number of spiritual debates at the time, plus it demonstrated the possibility for alternatives to the Protestant church.  Transcendentalism developed as the most radical of all the alternatives, as a mixture of Romantic poetry, pantheistic Christianity, and pre-Marxist political socialism vis-a-vis the ideas of Charles Fourier.  Because Rose’s text is focused on the group as a social, rather than literary or spiritual, movement, many of the chapters are about those members who were most socially active (and therefore not Henry David Thoreau).  Rose includes profiles of the most socially significant Transcendentalists, including men like George Ripley, who left little writing but was a unique Unitarian minister whose involvement with the Transcendentalists led him to found Brook Farm (a Transcendentalist farm collective that Rose discussed at length) with his wife Sophia Ripley.  Elizabeth Peabody is another of the Transcendentalists discussed at length by Rose, whose work was primarily focused on new ideas in education and the domestic sphere.  These individuals were engaged with reforming the social sphere in accordance with recently emergent ideas about liberal spirituality.  Much of the book is about the social activism of these figures and their fight against slavery or the subjugation of women.
 

Rose’s book is a comprehensive look at the Transcendentalists on an axis other than the literary.  Rose’s analysis of the cultural milieu that the Transcendentalists grew out of as social activists is fascinating.  The historical analysis of Brook Farm brings the Transcendentalists onto similar spiritual-social ground as the religious groups discussed in The Communistic Societies of the United States by Charles Nordhoff.  Rose’s book also contains appendices which provide tabled details about Unitarian churches in Boston, and about the Brook Farm collective.  Finally, Rose contains a comprehensive bibliography which organizes texts by Transcendentalists according to their activist causes, which is a useful tool for further research on the Transcendentalists or on the activist rhetoric of certain subjects.